Civil, political and social rights in the British state

Marshall's essay on civil, political and social rights is framed by the nation-state. While many readers will find his reference to this state as England irritating, he does at least implicitly make a correct point, that by his time these rights were largely equalised over Great Britain (although not the United Kingdom). Civil rights were achieved during the 18th and 19th century. Political rights were equalised among the constituent nations with the uniform franchise provisions of 1884. The foundations of the welfare state under the Liberal government after 1906 and its development by the Labour government after 1945 were British in scope, and even the devolved government of Northern Ireland chose to shadow them. Yet we now know that this did not reflect a deep national integration as imagined by certain observers in the 1960s and early 1970s (Blondel, 1974; Finer, 1974), but rather a historical contingency, an alignment of social forces and demands that would not necessarily persist. Even as Marshall wrote, there was a revived Scottish home rule movement, arguing that political rights for Scotland must include a parliament of its own, against the main political parties who continued to insist that they could be realised by Scots as British citizens within a unitary polity. Marshall does draw attention to a tension between social rights and the market economy, a tension that has since increased and taken on a territorial dimension. He does not, on the other hand, mention a classic tension (identified in de Tocqueville, 1981) between political and civil rights, as democracy threatens to turn into the dictatorship of the majority or encourage populist policies aimed at whoever might be identified as deviant. Nor does he explore the relationship between social and civil rights as exemplified in the debate over whether to deal with various forms of misbehaviour as social or criminal issues. Devolution since 1999 has brought all these issues to the fore.

It is commonplace nowadays to note that devolution in the UK did not start from a clean slate. There was administrative devolution to all three peripheral territories and Northern Ireland had had home rule between 1922 and 1971. Institutions had survived the various unions and there were distinct interest groups and networks. Scotland and Northern Ireland had their own statute book.